Most vehicles are now equipped with hardware, such as a telematics unit, that enables a variety of wireless communications, including connecting a consumer device to the Internet. The telematics unit is able to act as wireless access point between the consumer device and a wireless carrier system (e.g., a cellular network) that provides access to the Internet.
Devices that connect to the Internet use a numerical Internet Protocol (IP) address to route a request from the consumer device to a particular server that hosts the site on the Internet. The request from the device, however, is generally in a human-readable domain name format (e.g., www.xxx.com), which cannot be directly read by computers. To resolve this format discrepancy, a Domain Name System (DNS) protocol is used to translate a user-friendly domain name into an IP address—a process referred to as DNS name resolution. This process utilizes DNS servers, which manage massive databases that map domain names to IP addresses. In practice, when a consumer device such as a computer on a home network connects to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), or through a WiFi network, the modem or router that assigns the device's network address also provides configuration data including one or more DNS servers that the device uses to translate DNS names to IP addresses.
Similarly, when connecting a consumer device to the Internet through a vehicle, the vehicle's hardware is generally pre-loaded with a default DNS server to be used by the consumer device. However, if the default DNS server stored in the vehicle's hardware is no longer valid or is otherwise unavailable, the consumer device is unable to connect to the Internet causing delays and poor performance.